Fraudsters Use Deepfake Video of Tim Cook to Promote Apple Crypto Scam on YouTube

September 7, 2022

Fraudsters repurposed an old interview with Apple CEO Tim Cook using AI or video editing to promote a fake crypto event on YouTube. The altered video was designed to mislead viewers into believing Tim Cook endorsed a new cryptocurrency scheme. The stream attracted tens of thousands of viewers, potentially exposing them to the scam before it was removed for violating YouTube’s terms of service.
Alleged deployer
unknown-deepfake-creators, unknown-scammers
Alleged developer
unknown-deepfake-technology-developers
Alleged harmed parties
tim-cook, apple, youtube-viewers, cryptocurrency-investors, general-public

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/786

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.